Scotland's Economy

Consumer Scotland Bill

June 7, 2019 by Jamie Hepburn MSP No Comments | Category Economy, Finance, Public Services

Like everyone else, I spend money on buying things and I get frustrated when I feel the service or quality falls below the standard I expected.

As the Minister responsible for consumer policy, I recognise this can have consequences for whole groups of people and negatively impact individual lives in serious and long-lasting ways.

The Scottish Government is working hard to make sure we respond to that. We want consumers to have a strong voice to represent them and use the new body to push for changes that’ll help the people of Scotland.

Today, the Scottish Parliament published the Consumer Scotland Bill, which is a significant step in our journey to achieving that vision.

Many of the issues consumers face in Scotland are unique due to our devolved services like health and legal services. We also have some demographic challenges such as a higher portion of people living in rural areas. That means the kind of damage consumers may suffer can be similar to that in other countries but the scale can be higher.

Consumer advocacy has delivered many successes, but it hasn’t changed in recent years, even though consumers, businesses and regulators have.

So Consumer Scotland will be an investigatory body as much as an advocacy one. It will be evidence-led and build strong partnerships with consumer groups, regulators and third sector organisations to seek collaborative solutions to complex problems. And it’ll do much more to ensure the consumer voice shapes its work.

We’ve already laid some groundwork for this, with our Customer Forum, which gets consumer representatives involved in the five year price reviews for water. We’ve also been working in energy. Our recently announced independent Energy Commission for Scotland will give Scottish consumers a more powerful voice in Scottish and British energy policy. Consumer Scotland will build on these examples and work to extend the concept into other areas, such as financial services.

But public authorities need to play a role too.

The decisions public authorities make in Scotland often affect consumers. This will increasingly be the case as we tackle some of our most difficult challenges, like the climate emergency. Policies to tackle these issues will only work if consumers support them, so we have to fully understand how consumers will be affected. Requiring public authorities to consider the consumer impacts of their decisions is one important way of ensuring that happens.

Publishing the Bill is a first step. There’s a lot of work ahead to understand what it will mean in practice. We’ll be working with consumer and regulatory experts to do that, but we’d like your feedback too. You can contact us on Twitter at @scotgoveconomy or by e-mail at ConsumerandCompetition@gov.scot.

Tags: consumerscotlandbill, finance, scottishbusinesses, scottisheconomy

Comments